La Intermundial Holobiente

The quartet La Intermundial Holobiente is a platform for the invention of more-than-human imaginative practices. Our attention sets in the inbetweenery laying amongst holobients and their worlds. At the moment, while evolving, we are developing a multi-angled conversation to imagine and materialise posthuman, non-anthropocentric worlds where anything and everything is taken into account. The materiality and the agency of the ten thousand things and its possibilities are what we are after: What type of agency drives a gust of wind to sparse seeds or to destroy a field? What is the point of view of a vulture, or of a piece of bone buried for 2000 years?

In her research about the evolution of life, biologist Lynn Margulis made the case that life evolves through cooperation rather than through competition and that there are no such things as ‘individuals’, but that life is entangled matter that chooses. She called these consortia of symbionts ‘holobionts’. By means of posthuman imagination, we extend this capacity of establishing symbiotic relationships beyond living beings to anything and everything that is and could be, and we call them ‘holobients’. Collective imagination is our vehicle towards abundance. Fiction is our strategy to open up to what is possible. Caring for what is possible, for possibilities of existence that are currently being ignored, is where we stand politically.

In La Intermundial Holobiente, we invite others to join us and come together around creative art practices in ways that are non-extractivist, non-hierarchical, radically inclusive, and irreverent towards some paradigms that we identify as holding our creative agency to ransom. All the decisions we take are based on a spirit of revolt. While revolution has a purpose, which is to attempt to take the power in a hierarchical system and replace it with a new power structure, revolting is a non-teleological, non-hierarchical and inherently creative way of dissolving power. It undermines hierarchy by allowing everything to be at the same horizontal level, and in doing so, allows for unexpected possibilities to emerge.

Therefore we stand for horizontal mediation as opposed to the hierarchy of representation, dream-imaging thinking taking over from the dominance of consciousness, emotions revalued in the face of analytic thinking and credulity rated higher over irony. At the moment we are incubating artistic projects through which we can explore these ideas and learn from practice. Our main project is called El Book Wei.

La Intermundial Holobiente is working currently on The Book of the Ten Thousand Things, which will be available to the public during 2022, on occasion of documenta fifteen.

La Intermundial Holobiente in practice: El Book Wei

“El Book Wei” is a collection of books written by anything and everything that there is.

Though intrinsically an infinite collection, we are set to materialising fifteen books for now.

To help us in our task, we create a chain of readers contributing from all paths of life, worldviews, and systems of knowledge and sensoria. We define ‘reading’ in a very wide sense. Our group of readers includes people and more-than-human entities with and without written languages, each one with their own reading system.

We call these readers correspondents.

These books are always written from the margins and through collective input into a cadavre exquis formed by paratexts. While the centre of all pages remains blank, they are not empty. Title, colophon, epigraphs, footnotes, quotes, notes, illustrations, captions, sketches, doodles, and marginalia grow as the book travels and lands in new habitats provided by correspondents, who keep interpreting the centre: the invisible text written by the holobiente author, a sympoet.

The challenge is therefore to give holobientes a space and a method for their stories to be told, without representing them, but by allowing their own voice to emerge through a collective exercise of imagination able to mediate invisible or intangible entities and let their own voice emerge.

Each book of El Book Wei collection can be seen as a nomadic locality, a residency space for correspondents to experience a radical practice of otherness, by hosting sympoets in their creative habitat, and, in so doing, helping with the cross-pollination of ideas, images, and affinities across commons and cosmoi from where the sympoets emerge.

Each book is a sounding board for the holobientes’ voice to vibrate.

Each book is a travelling place, which gets written while travelling.

Each book is hostis and hospes at once: it hosts and it is hosted.

Each book is, in that sense, an infinite house.